The Canterbury Sisters

by Kim Wright

  I have no trouble finding Deeson’s, which takes up a broad expanse of a building. The night is fine and the patio is charming, with barrels of what appear to be herbs growing amid the sleek slate-top tables. No one is smoking. I find my friends on the inside, arranged much as they were at our first meal back in the George. One notable change. Becca is now beside Jean. They smile and wave when they see me enter the restaurant, all except for Tess, who wails, “Oh dear, we’ve already ordered.”

  “And I’ve already eaten,” I tell her, pulling out the only empty chair. “I just came by for a glass of wine.”

  While walking over, I’d decided to buy a bottle for the table, not something merely good enough, but something great, a send-off for our last evening together. The wine list comes in a heavy leather folder, page after page of thoughtfully chosen varieties, and my extended consultation with the sommelier—a real sommelier, for we have somehow managed to return to 2015—clearly amuses the other women. I settle on a Châteauneuf-du-Pape and say, “Okay, who won?”

  “Tess won’t tell us,” says Steffi.

  “Only because I haven’t decided,” Tess says. “I want to hear what all of you think.”

  “I’d say Jean,” says Angelique, carefully pouring the olive oil and then the balsamic until she has made a bit of a flower pattern on her broad white plate. She dips a crust of bread into the heart of the daisy, like a child playing with her food. Since arriving in Canterbury, Angelique has found her whole face again and painted it on. If I’d passed her in the street I’m not sure I would have recognized her.

  “I’d agree,” says Jean with a laugh, “if for no other reason than the fact that I told twice as many tales as anyone else. You two missed it,” she adds, turning toward me and then Valerie, “but I came clean yesterday afternoon. Becca was quite right with what she said at lunch, just before the accident . . . Do you even remember what we were talking about? It all became such a mad jumble there in the street, with everything happening at once.”

  “I remember exactly,” Valerie says, probably to the surprise of no one. I’m the snob and she’s the blurter and Becca’s going to sulk and Angelique has on enough makeup for ten women and Tess is going to fret the details and Claire sleeps around while Jean writes big checks and Silvia squints and Steffi’s a food freak . . . and it’s all okay, because that’s just who we are. In fact it’s more than okay, it’s perfect. This whole night has an air of perfection about it. It sits here rounded and complete before us, like an unbroken egg.

  “Right before the boy on the bike got hit,” Valerie is saying, “Becca was saying that her father was really shot during a drug deal. When you screamed, for a minute I thought that was why.”

  Jean nods. “Precisely. My first tale was a complete lie. Yesterday afternoon I finally screwed up my courage enough to tell everyone what it had really been like living in an affluent suburb with three children and all the time trying to hide the fact that your husband’s an addict. To give you the short version, Allen’s drug use started legally, as I gather these things often do. Prescription painkillers and the like, but when he got the chance to go to Central America . . .” She shrugs. “I was afraid he took the job just to give himself better access, and that’s why I was so insistent that we all had to pack up and follow him. And once we were there, I bribed our driver, Antonio, to keep an eye on him, but as it turns out Allen was bribing Antonio too, to keep the truth from me, and since Allen was paying more . . .”

  It all makes sense now. Jean’s frantic desire to hold together the illusion of the perfect family, Allen’s late-night rides through the dark parts of a dark city, the gunshot, the splash. She has broken off her story because the appetizers have arrived. They are dainty and delicate, little towers of scallops and salads shaped like fans, and the wine is here too, hovering just over my shoulder, waiting for my nod.

  So I nod, the sommelier pours, I swirl, then sniff and taste. It is deep and subtle. Exactly what I want, and what I want to give the others. Glasses are being brought around too—thin-lipped, deep-bowled ones, proper glasses for a proper wine—but I notice how many of the women have seafood appetizers and wonder if I should have gotten a white as well. No matter. Nothing is perfect. This is close enough.

  Becca, in fact, is beaming, looking around the trendy restaurant with satisfaction, before raising the goblet to her lips. “Canterbury’s awesome,” she says to Tess. “Is it hard to get into school here?”

  “There are several colleges and universities in town,” Tess says, “some more demanding than others . . .”

  “She got a fifteen-forty on her SATs,” Jean says, pride in her voice. “And she’s number two in a class of five hundred.” Another surprise, but why shouldn’t Becca be smart? She has hung with us extraordinarily well on this trip, considering her age, and I’ve been too quick to put each woman in a little box, I realize. They are all bigger than my mnemonics. They carry many tales.

  “The UK has its own admissions tests,” Tess says, “which are utterly different from those in the States, but I could give you some information if you’re truly interested.”

  “Look at this,” Steffi says, tilting her salad plate. “Artichokes, spinach. Red and yellow peppers. Phytonutrients. Antioxidants. Fiber. I’m in heaven.”

  “We should stay a day longer,” says Claire. “It’s such a charming little town. Why didn’t we all plan to stay a day longer?”

  “They have river tours,” I tell her.

  “River tours,” she repeats slowly. “And what do you see?”

  “Mostly the river, I’m afraid,” Tess says with a laugh. “But I suppose that can be romantic, if you’re the kind of person who likes rivers. It’s the same one we crossed a few days ago, back at a much narrower point. The Stour. Nice enough little trickle. It just sort of runs, you know, from here to there.”

  “Oh dear,” says Jean. “I seem to have lost my napkin.”

  “Sit tight, Mom,” says Becca, twisting to reach down beneath the table. “I’ll get it.”

  “Taking nothing away from Jean,” Steffi says, “I found Angelique’s tale of Psyche compelling as well. And Valerie, with the Sir Gawain story. What do women want? That may really be the most powerful question of all, don’t you think?”

  Silvia is nodding. “I was about to say the same thing. That question has haunted me for the last two days. In my opinion Valerie should get the free dinner.”

  “Hear, hear,” says Claire, raising her glass for the toast, but Valerie is already shaking her head.

  “I won’t accept,” she says, “because I’m the only one who ducked the challenge. You all told the truth about your lives, more or less, except for Che . . .”

  “Hey,” I say. “I bled.”

  “Yes, you bled,” Valerie concedes. “All over the place and that buys you a pass. But I just repeated a story I read in a book, so I don’t deserve to win. Not when I’m sitting among women who—”

  “Then tell us something true,” Jean says. “About yourself. Right now.”

  “Yeah,” says Angelique, spearing a piece of candied violet with her fork and popping it in her mouth. “Your story asked what women want, so tell us what you want.”

  I sit back. Scan my slow and systematic way around the table, my eyes coming to rest on Becca. She is watching the other young people in the room, college students on dates, and still smiling, like a girl who is getting a glimpse of her future and likes what she sees. When Jean’s shoulder brushes hers, she does not flinch. Something has shifted between them, something as small as the mother dropping a napkin and the daughter picking it up. Or perhaps that’s huge, I don’t know, and I’m not foolish enough to think Jean’s confession has healed every wound. They will fight again, hard and soon, but for now a new equilibrium has been established.

  And I’m conscious that I’m holding my breath, waiting for what Valerie will say. Claire’s gla
ss is still raised. Angelique picks a stray petal from her lip. Silvia has brought her hands together like the Mona Lisa.

  “What I want,” Valerie says, “is a thousand more nights like this one.”

  “Exactly,” says Claire, and Steffi clinks her glass against hers. The conversation starts up again, one woman saying something to the person seated next to her, the subtle vibrations of companionship, and I remember a news show I once saw back in the States. They were interviewing the NYPD’s most successful negotiator and they asked him how he did it. How he got the kidnapper to release the hostages, the suicide to come down from the ledge, the terrorist to reveal the location of the bomb. And he’d said that he started each negotiation the same way, by saying to the other person: “Tell me your story,” because we want to tell our stories, all of us from criminals to priests. It’s perhaps our deepest need—to speak and to listen, even if we don’t always know what the stories mean. Somehow we know that just the telling can have enough magic to bring us here, to this holy place, to this circle of friends, to this happy end.

  The servers are swarming the table to remove the appetizer plates, making way for the entrées. I look out the door. I should be going.

  But first I drain my glass. Catch the eye of Valerie, who is sitting at the far end of the table. “This wine,” I say, and I have to raise my voice to be heard above the chatter of the others. “What did you think of it?”

  “I think it’s fine,” she calls back. “In fact, I think it’s one of the finest things I’ve had in a very long time. Thank you.”

  THE GATES to Canterbury are locked. Truly locked, with an old-fashioned chain and padlock woven through the iron bars. I walk back through the hotel, nodding at the desk clerk, and down another hall, this one leading to the Cathedral grounds. The door snaps shut behind me as I exit the lodge, followed by a frightening little buzz, the sort of sound you hear in prison movies. They’ve said my room key will get me back into the hotel and I try it, just to be sure. It works, but I’m still jumpy. It’s dark out here on the Cathedral side and the transition from the modern world to the medieval is too abrupt. I take a few tentative steps away from the hotel, flinching as my foot leaves the level sidewalk and sinks into gravel. It’s not just dark, it’s very dark, with all the ambient light muted in order to make the Cathedral shine even brighter in contrast. When the bells chime nine, a shudder runs through me, top to bottom and then back again, as if my spine has become a lightning rod.

  But I have come here to walk, and so walk I must. I start out resolutely in the opposite direction from the path Valerie and I took today, and there is no sound anywhere except for the steady crunch of my boots in the gravel and the faint echo of reverberation from the bells. I’m being ridiculous, I think. I’m not alone out here. The church grounds are never empty. Matthew said as much today. Literally hundreds of employees and volunteers, dozens of services a week, an army of a cleaning crew, including one laudable fellow who simply washes the windows all day long, week after week, moving in a never-ending orbit around the Cathedral. Some of these people are bound to be merely steps away.

  This is what I say to myself, what I think, but the truth is, it feels empty. Empty and dark.

  And then I see him. A single man, walking toward me.

  Well, all right, maybe not toward me. That’s dramatic. He’s probably doing nothing more than what I’m doing, giving in to an urge to walk around the Cathedral at night, and it’s only by chance that he happens to be coming from the opposite direction. I can’t see his face, but the outline of his body looks ordinary. He’s one of the businessmen from the lodge, most likely, or just another tourist. His hands are in his pocket . . . reaching for a gun? But no, of course not, I’m being crazy. This is England. He’d be reaching for a knife. But no, that’s crazy too, people don’t get raped on the grounds of Canterbury, and it’s only by chance that it’s just me and him out here in the darkness, a mere fluke of timing that I can look in all directions without seeing or hearing anyone else. That is what we’re paying for in the lodge, after all, this sense of isolation and privacy. And I haven’t managed to encounter a killer, not here within the holy stillness of Canterbury—although let’s face it, the safety record of the place isn’t exactly unblemished, is it?

  I have two options now. I could turn and walk toward the lodge, but that would mean that the man and I would be moving in the same direction, all the way back, and I would have to stay scared, never sure if he was going to catch up with me from behind. So maybe it’s better to pass him face-to-face, just like I’m about to do, because I’m being silly. There’s nothing scary about this man, not really. I’ve let my imagination and the events of the last few days run away with me, make me convinced that every moment has portent. We are closer now. No more than twenty feet apart, and I look directly toward him, toward the shadows.

  “There you are,” he says.

  Here I am.

  “Lucky, isn’t it?” he says. “Amazing luck, that I would find you just like this, on my first walkaround.”

  He steps toward me and for the first time I see his face. There’s a shard of illumination bouncing off something, shining through the glass face of some saint or another, or maybe somewhere somebody has opened a door. But a slant of light shoots across the gravel path and I see the man from London, the one from the George, the man with the closely cropped hair. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out my phone.

  “I believe you may have been looking for this,” he says.

  IT’S A grand gesture. Bringing the phone all the way to Canterbury just to return it to me in person.

  Or so I tell him, as we sit on a bench looking up at the Cathedral. He reminds me that trains run from London to Canterbury on the hour.

  “That’s right,” I say. “You can pop down and then pop back. You told me that yourself.”

  And then he fills in the rest of the story. How as he was paying his tab he saw I’d left my phone but by then the women and I had already departed. He started to turn it in to the barkeeper, but something stopped him. It’s mostly kids who work there, he says, kids who’d love to have an iPhone. It hadn’t been hard to play detective. He’d woken the phone up and been greeted at once with Freddy’s picture and he’d remembered how old I said I was and my dog’s name. My password was most likely some combination of the year of my birth and the name of my pet. People are predictable that way. They use the same random facts over and over as identification and any code that’s easy to remember is likewise easy to crack. That’s how he’d found my itinerary. Known not just that I would end up in Canterbury but also the hotel where I’d be staying and the date I’d arrive.

  “You could have just sent the phone ahead to the hotel,” I say.

  “Yes,” he says. “I could have. I thought of that.”

  But when he’d gone back to the George for lunch a few days later the bartender told him I’d returned and that I’d become, in the words of the boy, “actually quite hysterical” when I had found my phone was missing. “At that point I knew I’d botched it,” he says. “I should have left the phone at the restaurant that first day, or tried to send it by messenger to one of your stops along the way. I decided that the safest thing—”

  He breaks off, looks at the phone in my hand. I still haven’t unlocked it. I’m not sure exactly what he’s done, but it’s not the safest thing. By coming here he’s thrown us both into uncertainty, and the thought is strange and thrilling.

  “That’s how I decided to deliver it myself,” he says. “I know it means a lot to you.”

  I swallow, not sure how to respond. If he got into my mail enough to see my itinerary, he has likely seen my whole life. Not only where I was going but why, and with whom, and who has tried to contact me and who has not. It would seem he must know everything about me now, not just the name of my dog and the date of my birth but all my little secrets and hopes, locked within the vault o
f my phone. He pinches his lower lip between his thumb and forefinger, tugs it a bit away from his face. He made that same gesture, six days ago in the George. I remember now. It’s what he does when he’s nervous. He is as unsure of me as I am of him.

  “What’s your name?” I ask. “You know so much about me, and I don’t even know your name.”

  “Dylan.”

  “Dylan?”

  “After Bob. Bob Dylan, your American folksinger. My parents were the most dreadful sort of hippies. The sort who end up turning their youngest child into an accountant. Chased me right into the world of numbers and ledgers, just so something would make sense. But I suppose it could have been worse. My brothers are called Arlo and Seeger. Why are you laughing like that? You think I’m daft for coming here, don’t you?”

  “Wait just a minute,” I say. “I’ll be right back.”

  I take my phone and walk farther down the path. Find one of the nooks within the wall, wedge myself beneath a window. Wait for my mother to butt in like she always does. To give me one of her predictable pep talks. Che, she would say, there are times when a girl’s got to take a chance. And not just any chance, baby. Take this one.

  But Diana is silent. She’s gone off somewhere, distracted by one of her bright shiny things. I press on my phone. He’s charged it. The screen lights up immediately, as bright as Canterbury. The little purple microphone snaps right to attention. I stare at it for a moment, then cut the phone off and walk back to the shadowy bench where Dylan is waiting.

  “All is well?” he says.

  “I don’t think you’re daft for coming,” I say, sitting back down beside him. “In fact, I’m glad you brought the phone here yourself. It was a grand gesture, but sometimes a person needs to make a grand gesture.”

  “I’ve been looking at the Cathedral,” he says. “What’s it like inside?”

  “Big.”

  “I’ve never been here. Mad thing for a Londoner to say, I know.”